New York’s disappearing Hallmark stores

These stationery stores, with their telltale throwback lettering, used to be in every neighborhood all over the city. In need of school supplies, Hello Kitty paraphernalia, and last-minute birthday cards? The Hallmark store was your solution.

These days, their numbers are dwindling, and the stores aren’t looking so spiffy. I guess Duane Reade and Rite-Aid have begun displacing them.

Sam’s Hallmark, above, is in East Harlem.

Serena’s continues to hang in there on East 23rd Street.

Sunnyside still has one too.

New York is a hell of a town

More than a few city neighborhoods currently or used to start with “Hell.” Hell’s Kitchen is the most famous—and enduring. (C’mon, does anyone really call it Clinton?)

The nabe’s moniker but it may have first been used in the late 1800s to describe the revolting slums and ferocious gangs in the West 30s and 40s.

Hell Gate is the name of the once-dangerous tidal strait separating Astoria from Randall’s Island. It’s also a lovely bridge that connects these two land masses across the East River.

Was Hell Gate once the name of the neighborhood on the Manhattan side of the East River too? I’m not sure, but maybe—there’s a Hell Gate Station post office on East 110th Street.

And let’s not forget the fantastically named Hell’s Hundred Acres, a gritty term for pre-1970s Soho. The beautiful cast-iron buildings that today house million-dollar lofts were used for decades as warehouses and manufacturing sites. 

Safety codes weren’t followed and the buildings allowed to deteriorate, so they often went up in flames—hence the nickname. This photo documents a 1958 fire in a Wooster Street factory that killed six firefighters. Hell’s Hundred Acres indeed.

Whatever happened to Hog Island?

A mile-long spit of land that surfaced off the coast of the Rockaways in the mid-1800s, Hog Island eventually became a popular summertime seaside resort along the lines of Rockaway Beach and Brighton Beach.

This favorite vacation destination for Tammany Hall politicians featured the usual late-19th century bathing facilities, pavilions, restaurants, and regular ferries. 

This print depicts neighboring resort Rockaway Beach. Hog Island probably looked similar.

So what happened to this modern-day Atlantis? First, it was battered by the Hurricane of 1893. While this category-2 storm reportedly triggered 30-foot sea swells off Coney Island on the night of August 23, it decimated the buildings on Hog Island.

A few more brutal storms in the 1890s sealed its fate; the sea swallowed it back up in 1902.

A Queens housewife gets the electric chair

Ruth Snyder was not the first woman to be put to death by New York state. But she’s perhaps the most famous. Tried in 1927 at the Long Island City courthouse for killing her husband, her case was a media sensation—and her execution caught on camera and published in the Daily News.

For two years, Ruth, a 32-year-old housewife in Queens Village, had been having an affair with a corset salesman named Judd Gray. The two soon began plotting the murder of Ruth’s husband, Albert.

On March 20, 1927, Albert was killed in a staged home-robbery-gone-wrong scenario: he was beaten, smothered with a chloroform-soaked pillow, and stranged with wire. 

Police quickly realized the home-robbery scenario didn’t add up and arrested Ruth and Judd, who confessed. On trial, each blamed the other for the murder. The jury believed them both and handed down two first-degree murder verdicts. 

Ruth and Judd were put to death in Sing Sing on January 12, 1928. Ruth went first. Just as the executioner delivered the fatal volts, a Chicago Tribune reporter snapped a photo of Ruth with a camera surreptitiously attached to his ankle. The shocking image ran in the next day’s Daily News.

About the case itself, it was the basis for the 1935 novel Double Indemnity, later made into a movie starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.

Kitschy and colorful 1960s store signs

Vintage signs like these have such a Jetsons-era feel. They liven otherwise drab city blocks with color and fun swinging-’60s fonts.

Superior Florists are off Sixth Avenue in the ever-shrinking flower district of the upper 20s:

The Carnegie Deli sign, on Seventh Avenue in the 50s, features a similar retro cursive font and an even brighter yellow hue:

At Greenpoint Avenue and Queens Boulevard in Sunnyside is the King Boulevard Mens Shop. (Suits for $79.99!) 

The poor Trowel & Square Ballroom, on 125th Street in Harlem, looks neglected and forlorn: 

Strange to name a ballroom after a tool used to spread dirt or cement. Does anyone know the history of this place?

“A frolic at Rockaway Beach”

In 1903, when his photo was taken, Rockaway Beach was earning a rep as “New York’s Playground.” Rockaway Playland amusement park had just been built in 1901, and thousands of city residents regularly crowded the boardwalk and beach.

Like so many other city neighborhoods, Rockaway Beach began its decline after World War II. It’s still hanging in there, just an A train ride away, luring day trippers and surfers in search of New York’s best waves.

A New York cop shot by the Mafia in Italy

Born in Salerno, Italy, in 1860, Giuseppe “Joseph” Petrosino joined the New York Police Department in 1883. He is the only New York cop killed in the line of duty on foreign soil.

Petrosino grew up in Little Italy. Fluent in many Italian dialects, he rose through the NYPD ranks quickly, earning a promotion to detective in 1895 and then founding the NYPD bomb squad to thwart Mafia bombings. 

After another promotion, to lieutenant, in 1908, Petrosino was put in charge of the Italian Squad, an elite group of detectives who handled mob-related crimes. On his watch, thousands of arrests were made, and crimes against Italians dropped by half.

In March 1909 he went to Palermo, Sicily, on a top-secret investigation. Mobsters in the U.S. would not kill a policeman. But in Palermo, things were different. Lured into a meeting with a supposed informant, Petrosino was shot dead.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers attended his funeral; the procession went from Little Italy to Calvary Cemetery in Queens. In 1987, Kenmare Square, on Lafayette Street, was renamed Joseph Petrosino Square. 

Brooklyn: the borough with its own holiday

If you notice lots of school-age kids roaming the streets on Thursday, chalk it up to the day off all city students get on the first Thursday in June.

Why the holiday? It’s a relic that originated way back in the 1820s as Anniversary Day (or Rally Day), which commemorated the formation of the Brooklyn Sunday School Union. Hey, Brooklyn didn’t earn its nickname, City of Churches, for being secular.

Campfire girls in middy blouses march down Bedford Avenue in honor of Brooklyn Day, around 1920.

For decades, the holiday was celebrated in Brooklyn, officially becoming Brooklyn Day in 1905. Tens of thousands of Brooklynites paraded all over the borough every year, carrying banners and listening to politicians expound on the importance of God, religion, and freedom.

By 1959, the holiday was broadened to Brooklyn-Queens Day; Queens Sunday Schools had been having parades of their own all along. In 2006 it became a day off for students in all five boroughs.

Congratulations to the class of 1916

Queens had only been part of New York City for 18 years when these seniors, from Long Island City’s William C. Bryant High School, earned their diplomas.

Most of the girls—with names like Agnes, Anna, and Frances—are wearing comfy middy blouses, the must-have fashion trend of the teens. The boys—several Williams and Georges—are stuck in suits.

An airplane view of two East River bridges

The Hell Gate and Triborough Bridges—spanking-new and gleaming in this technical postcard—connect Astoria to Ward’s and Randall’s Islands. The islands are two separate entities here, but they’ve long since been united into one island via landfill.

It’s a strange view: Manhattan and the Bronx look like pastoral, barely populated villages. Astoria, on the other hand, comes off as an industrial wasteland.

The Triborough Bridge was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008. I hope they don’t rename the Hell Gate; it’s too colorful a name to lose.